Share this:

Peter Medawar - Banquet Speech

There are really no words adequate to this magnificent and moving
occasion - or no words that come easily to someone who has been
suddenly transported from an ivory tower to a golden palace - but
two things I must try to say.

You have just been told that science grows
like an organism. You have been told that, if we today see
further than our predecessors, it is only because we stand on
their shoulders. But this is an occasion on which I should prefer
to remember, not the giants upon whose shoulders we stood, but
the friends with whom we stood arm in arm. Let me therefore pay
tribute to two men who began as my students but who soon became
close and dear colleagues in so much of my work: Rupert
Billingham and Leslie Brent. And let me also pay tribute to a man
whose great synoptic grasp of the fundamental problems of biology
has at all times illumined all our thinking: Sir Macfarlane
Burnet.

It is a sign of the times that the Nobel
award for the advancement of the medical sciences should yet
again come to someone who is not medically qualified. (Here I
speak only for myself: Sir Macfarlane is indeed a doctor of
medicine, though I should be very sorry to receive medical
treatment from him.) It is also a sign of the times - though our
brothers of physics and chemistry may smile to hear me say so -
that biology is now a science in which theories can be devised:
theories which lead to predictions and predictions which
sometimes turn out to be correct. These facts confirm me in a
belief I hold most passionately - that biology is the heir of all
the sciences.

Your Majesty, a man who claims to be almost
speechless must not put too great a strain on the credulity of
his audience. On Sir Macfarlane's behalf as well as my own let me
only say - what any man can always find words to say - thank you
for the incomparable honour you have bestowed upon us.

Prior to the speech, B. Lindblad, President
of the Royal Academy of Sciences, addressed the laureate:
"Dr. Burnet and Dr. Medawar, in your discovery of immunity
produced in the embryonic stage and of actively acquired
tolerance you have found a new biological law, opening up new
vistas in experimental biology. The phenomenon of immunological
tolerance which you have discovered will most certainly be of
direct practical importance for the treatment of various kinds of
injuries and diseases."